


like memories (in cold decay)

by librawritings



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, Chiron - Freeform, Chiron is mentioned, F/M, Mentions of Tartarus, Post-The Blood of Olympus (Heroes of Olympus), Post-The Heroes of Olympus, This is definitely angsty and I'm not sure it makes sense, Trauma, but also a bit hopeful, implied PTSD, percabeth, rick may think they can just move on but we know better, they talk about tartarus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:26:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23208469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/librawritings/pseuds/librawritings
Summary: Camp Half-Blood used to feel like home; or at least, it used to feel safe. Not that it was ever completely safe – Percy Jackson has nearly died several times within the camp’s borders, but only nearly. And, to be perfectly honest, his worst near-death experiences always occurred somewhere else.So, yes, Camp Half-Blood used to feel like his home, where he could escape from a troubling school year, from bad grades, from the mortal world.Percy doesn’t remember what home feels like anymore, because he’s no longer safe anywhere.Or,Percy and Annabeth finally talk about what's been waking them up at night.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson
Comments: 10
Kudos: 113





	like memories (in cold decay)

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Linkin Park's song The Catalyst. 
> 
> I do not own Percy Jackson, or any characters from this universe.

Camp Half-Blood used to feel like home; or at least, it used to feel safe. Not that it was ever _completely_ safe – Percy Jackson has nearly died several times within the camp’s borders, but only _nearly_. And, to be perfectly honest, his worst near-death experiences always occurred somewhere else.

So, yes, Camp Half-Blood used to feel like his home, where he could escape from a troubling school year, from bad grades, from the mortal world.

Percy doesn’t remember what home feels like anymore, because he’s no longer safe anywhere. Not with his mom and Paul, not here in Camp Half-Blood, not even in his own mind, and certainly not when he falls asleep.

* * *

With a gasp, Percy sits up in his bed in Cabin 3, nearly smacking his head on the wooden bunk above him. His eyes fly around wildly, but yes, there – there’s the softly glowing piece of coral on the dresser, right across from him. His muscles are tight, ready to bolt, but he keeps his eyes on the coral, even as he hears the roars and snarls ringing in his ears. Even as his vision flickers between red, hazy fog and the clear air of nighttime at camp. He just keeps his eyes on that coral.

He found it on the beach a couple weeks ago while strolling through the sand, woken from another nightmare. It was dangerous to be out at night with the harpies patrolling, but he couldn’t sit in that bunkbed and pretend that everything was fine when it wasn’t. Percy had needed to escape, so he went to the beach, and watched the reflection of the moon on the water. Then, suddenly, it was there – a piece of coral washed up on the shore among the waves, a soft green glow emanating from it.

Percy knew who it was from. It was a little embarrassing to need a nightlight at the age of seventeen, but Percy can’t deny that it’s helped him.

Finally, his mind clears, and he slumps back on the bed, closing his eyes. He’s so tired. So, so, so tired. He can’t sleep for longer than a few hours at a time without memories infiltrating his mind, of seas of monsters cheering for his death, or Annabeth blindly stumbling through hell, oror _or_. He’s witnessed so many horrors, so many deaths. They all come back to haunt him now.

He’s so tired. But he knows that if he tries to sleep, he’ll only find more nightmares to greet him.

And suddenly, the thought of laying here in his bed, pretending to be fine, makes him want to throw up. He is _not fine_ , and he won’t be fine any time soon. His bed feels like a coffin, where he’s supposed to package away all of his demons and force himself to be normal. Percy isn’t normal; he never was in the first place. But now, he is also distinctly _different_ from the rest of the demigods he knows, too. Only one other person knows what it’s like to stumble through Tartarus, and she’s just as damaged as he is.

The coffin lid is close to slamming down on his head. Swimming in memories, Percy forces himself up out of bed, even though his eyes aren’t focused. He won’t be going back to sleep anytime soon.

Percy stumbles over to his dresser and yanks a t-shirt over his head, tugging the fabric down until he’s completely covered. He’s sweating, but the shirt feels comfortingly soft against his skin. It’s another reminder – he is here, he is here, _he is here_. Nothing this soft would have survived Tartarus.

Briefly, Percy runs his fingers over the rough and bumpy surface of the coral, picking it up and letting it ground him. It’s a dead piece of coral, obviously, but it still glows with a faint greenish tinge. He knows about the symbiotic relationship between the coral and zooxanthellae, algae that lives within the coral. The coral is completely dependent on the algae; without it, it wastes away and inevitably dies after starving. He wonders if this coral was already dead before it was sent to him, or if it was alive and chosen specifically for him, washing up on the sand among the waves and waiting.

What a waste, if it was.

Because, deep down, Percy Jackson knows this: he is broken. And he doesn’t know how to be fixed.

Abruptly, he sets down the coral and strides towards the doorway to his cabin. Inside, he faces nothing but memories of pain and death. Outside, at least, there is the added bonus of having to sneak past the patrol harpies.

Percy cautiously opens the door and pokes his head out, blinking slowly. When the coast seems clear, he begins a slow jog towards the ocean that’s not too far from his cabin. In the distance, a shriek resounds throughout the valley. His heart begins to beat harder, adrenaline pumping, because while he _could_ easily take down a harpy, he left Riptide inside his cabin. And he would feel bad to do it, too. The harpies are just doing their job.

But luckily, the scream is a false alarm, and soon his bare feet are hitting sand instead of earth. Percy strolls to the sand’s edge, feeling the lick of the saltwater against his skin. Instantly, he feels better, stronger, surer of himself. He feels alive.

This is not the first time he’s snuck out to come to the ocean. In fact, it’s the sixth night in a row that he’s done this, and the harpies are none the wiser.

Percy sits down, relishing the feeling of the waves lapping up around him, of the cold, wet sand beneath him. With each push of the water against his body, a sense of calmness closes over him. _Nothing_ can take this one good thing from him, not even Tartarus. It may have corrupted everything else, like his sleep, his health, his relationships, but this, _this_ , it will never touch.

After all, there was no ocean in Tartarus. Only rivers of fire and despair, of memory loss and agony.

And Percy doesn’t mean to, but suddenly, he remembers the sight of Nyx rising from the darkness of Chaos. He remembers running through her Mansion of Night, of _knowing_ that if he opened his eyes, he would see horrors that would drive him to insanity. He remembers the cold sound of Tartarus’ laugh, remembers feeling his mind begin to lose its grip and his soul begin to tear away from his body. He remembers gripping Annabeth’s hand tightly and hoping, _praying_ to the gods for anyone to please save them, _please_ , he doesn’t want to die, he doesn’t want to lose Annabeth and _gods, he does not want to die, pleasepleasepleaseplease._

And then he’s sitting there in the fucking waves, crying. The tears sting and blur his eyes, but they won’t stop coming. He doesn’t even bother trying to stop them.

Annabeth finds him not too long after.

“Hey,” he says when she sits down on the sand beside him, and his voice cracks, but he doesn’t have it within him to care. She’s seen him at his worst, and this is not it – no, his worst was when he forced poison to slowly crawl to Akhyls, so he could choke her to a miserable death, because that’s what the wretched thing deserved, and gods he was so angry –

Percy shudders. Annabeth leans into him, steadying him with just her breath and the feeling of her head against his shoulder.

“Hey,” she replies back, voice barely above a whisper.

“Funny seeing you here,” he tries to joke. It falls flat, considering Annabeth has found every time he’s come here. He wonders if she finds the water comforting, too, or if she just finds _him_ comforting. Despite it all.

Annabeth smiles; he can feel the ghost of it through his t-shirt, and then she kisses his shoulder gently. It’s all he can do to not start crying once again. But then she shivers, and _oh fuck_ , Percy realizes that it’s October and it’s chilly, and they’re sitting in the cold waves of the Long Island Sound. He wraps his arm around her waist to pull her closer, before ultimately picking her up and placing her between his legs, so she can be totally enveloped by his body heat. It is also a convenient position for him to hold her in, so he does.

She relaxes almost instantly, and they gaze out at the water in silence for many minutes. Percy knows that Annabeth didn’t just stumble out of bed because he needed her; she was chased out by her own demons, her own inner battles. And while he is aware that Annabeth has found a great confidant in Piper, he knows deep-down that it’s long past time he and Annabeth talked about Tartarus, and why they’re both still at Camp Half-Blood despite the fact that they should be in their senior year of high school.

Though, technically, he should be making up for the year he missed when Hera kidnapped him rather than working on his senior year of high school anyway. But that’s not the point. The point is that they need to talk.

“Annabeth,” he whispers, and feels her shift in his arms. “What woke you up?”

She stiffens, but Percy doesn’t let her go. She’s silent, but Percy doesn’t press her.

For a few more minutes, there is nothing but the wind and the gentle lapping of the sea around their legs. Then, she sighs and ducks her head. “I was having a nightmare,” she confides, “about…the Doors. When Bob and Damasen began to fight the monsters to give us time…but I looked around and you weren’t there. You had left me behind, and I was going to die because of it. I never would have been able to hold the elevator doors shut by myself.”

Any bit of warmth inside Percy goes cold. He wants to tell her he would never, _ever_ , abandon her but he holds his tongue. That isn’t the point. He is fairly certain that Annabeth knows that, but that doesn’t stop the nightmares from coming.

Instead, he stays quiet and presses a kiss to the top of her head and squeezes her lightly, a sort-of nonverbal _nah, not happening_.

“What about you?”

His lips part, but the words don’t come out. _Thinking_ about talking things out is so much easier than actually doing it, he realizes. That’s why Annabeth took so long to speak. It’s not that she didn’t remember her nightmare, or even necessarily that she had to debate about telling him – she had to confront it herself and then speak it aloud, and now he must do the same.

Still, it takes him a few minutes to think through, to even _want_ to think through it, and in the end, he only does it because Annabeth did it, too. “I dreamed about Tartarus. I mean, obviously, but I dreamed about when it…when he appeared in front of us, to kill us. But this time, he succeeded. He killed us, so slowly…” He shakes his head, deciding it would probably be best not to describe to Annabeth how Tartarus had killed her first, and then him, and how much agony he had been in knowing she was dead and feeling his own essence splinter apart.

“That sounds horrible,” she comments, and Percy can’t help but chuckle.

“It sucked,” he agrees, “but, Annabeth…I can’t stop thinking about what he said to us, down there. How not even the gods had deserved his attention, but we got it. And we _lived_.”

Annabeth shakes her head, shoulders sagging as she leans back against his chest. “I think about that, too. Why us? Why not someone else? It makes me so… _angry_ that we survived one war just to be thrown into another one where we were forced to not only fight once more, but also go through actual hell.”

It’s something that Percy wrestles with every single day. He lost months of his life because of Hera, and then the gods let them fall. Bacchus even hinted about it. And gods, he’s so angry over it. He is so full of rage that its occasionally taken over him. Like when he was staying with his mom back in the city and he found himself overly irritated with the crowds, despite having lived in Manhattan his entire life; he snapped at a businessman who pressed in too close to him, and nearly got physical despite the poor guy never actually doing anything wrong. Or even here, at Camp, when some of the younger campers laughed too loudly as they walked by his cabin and he yelled at them for it. One of them, a young daughter of Demeter, actually cried.

Stupid, worthless things to get so blindingly angry over. Yet it happened, and it keeps happening. For as often as Percy feels the weight of everything on his shoulders (including the memory of the actual sky on his shoulders), he feels angry about carrying it all, too.

“You and I need help.” Percy mutters, letting out a bitter chuckle. But then Annabeth starts laughing, her shoulders shaking with the force of it, and he can’t help but join in. They sit there in the sand, laughing, for what feels like hours. It’s cathartic; with every laugh that manages to make its way out, Percy feels lighter.

Annabeth giggles quietly to herself, finally calming down. “The worst part is that you’re right. We _do_ need help.”

Percy’s smile fades a bit as he contemplates what Annabeth said. “But how can we get help? No mortal therapist can deal with our problems.”

Annabeth leans her head back against him. He can almost feel her brain turning, analyzing every possibility. “I don’t know, Percy. But maybe we should ask Chiron. He’s seen heroes deal with practically everything.”

“Everything but this,” Percy snorts.

“Well, yes, but surely he has to know something about…about what we’re going through.”

Percy knows that she’s right. And he knows that Chiron has been waiting for them, either together or apart, to come to him. He’s felt the centaur’s eyes on him at dinner, noticed how, whenever Percy lost control, he has always been nearby. And Percy knows it must be killing him to wait and watch them go through this, but he would never force them to talk about it.

Percy looks up at the stars, sighing softly. “Chiron is a good place to start,” he admits.

He can practically _feel_ it when she smirks. “I love it when you admit that I’m right.”

He rolls his eyes and flicks her head, ignoring her squawk of outrage. “I admit that you’re right all the time.”

“This has been a great night for me. Annabeth 2, Percy 0.”

Percy laughs and grabs her fingers, intertwining them with his own. He squeezes, and she squeezes back. Distantly, he thinks he can see that the sky is getting just a little bit lighter. The sun will begin to rise, soon, and banish the nightmares away for the day.

“We’re going to be okay.” He murmurs softly, watching for that first hint of sunlight.

It’s silent for a little while longer. Slowly, the edges of the sky, beyond the ocean, begin to turn a light gray and then a soft pink.

Annabeth exhales at the sight of it, at that bit of beauty only they are awake to see.

“Yeah. We’ll be all right.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure what this was; I just know that I wrote it, and this was where it naturally seemed to end. It is a mess and probably needs a lot more editing, but, alas. I also really enjoyed the concept of Poseidon at least giving Percy something, even though Percy resents it a little bit. That was fun to write.
> 
> Anyway, I hoped you enjoyed this! It was a bit angsty there but I think Percy just needed to cry and talk with Annabeth, and now they will get help together :')


End file.
